Application Security Lead

We're REA
- REA Group

is not your average digital business. From humble beginnings in a garage in Melbourne’s east in 1995, we have grown into a leading global digital business, specialising in property.

With bold and ambitious goals, we are changing the way the world experiences property. No matter where you're at on your property journey, we're here to help with every step - whether that's finding or financing your next home.

Our people are the key to our success. At the heart of everything we do, is a thriving culture centred around high performance and care. We are purpose driven and collaborative, which drives innovation and our ability to make a real impact. As such, we’re proud to be named in Australia’s “Top 5” Best Workplaces two years in a row, as well as being recognised as a Best Workplace for Women.

Where the team fits in

The Application Security Lead will lead the newly established Application Security team, which - alongside the Security Operations, Security Engineering, and Security Advisors teams - forms Group Security. The Group Security team work together to embed security throughout REA, empowering staff to make good risk decisions and equipping them with the tools to do so - a Cyber health service, not a police force.

Group Security works across REA to protect corporate infrastructure and cloud environments, drive the adoption of secure patterns and behaviours, and rapidly respond to security events to keep REA safe. We’re looking to level up our security capabilities and we’d love your help.

Our strategy is simple - leverage adoption to scale security. We are accomplishing this by ensuring REA systems and data are trustworthy, highly available, and resilient to cyber threats. And equally as important as the technology we build, we strive to inform staff and customers alike to make good security decisions.

What the role is all about

You will be both an organiser and a practitioner. You will build relationships with leaders in the product delivery organisation and work with them to embed yourself (and later, your team members) for short (weeks-long) engagements in software delivery teams to resolve issues through pair programming and upskilling team members including establishing security champions.

You will use your capability building, influencing and community building skills to further the development of the security and custodianship culture at REA.

You will collaborate with delivery teams in the implementation of solutions using a variety of programming languages and cloud technologies.

The Lead supports the Application Security Squad in the following ways:

- Providing technical team leadership for a team of highly capable engineers
- Designing, building, testing and deploying changes to software to remediate security issues and integrate security tools, using a variety of technologies and platforms.
- Helping define and manage roadmaps
- Work with product delivery teams to embed security practices into their ways of working
- Co-ordinating and planning the activities required to deliver team outcomes
- Providing mentoring and guidance to all members of the team
- Reporting on progress towards objectives and working to remove roadblocks to progress
- Advocate for security practices within the developer community
- Publicly celebrating the small and big successes of the squad

Who we’re looking for
- Web technologies, common web frameworks, their vulnerabilities and mitigations,
- Security within the software development lifecycle,
- Agile and continuous delivery methodologies and ways of working,
- Product development,
- Making trade-offs between risk, reward and prioritising improvements.
- 8+ years of experience working in software development,
- Team leadership,
- Organising a stream of work, planning and executing against defined objectives,
- Navigating complex organisational change challenges using systems and product thinking.

Dev Skills:

- Specialist skills in two or more of our programming languages - Scala, Java, Ruby, TypeScript and JavaScript,
- Familiarity with infrastructure as code and build tools like Terraform and Buildkite,
- Specialist skills in modern software development techniques such as object orientation, test driven development, micro-services and continuous delivery,
- Pair programming.

Other Skills
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills,
- Understanding of cloud infrastructure especially AWS,
- Relationship building,
- Tertiary qualification in Computer Science or similar highly desirable,
- Teaching / coaching and capability building,
- Influencing,
- Building community engagement across a software engineering cohort,
- Able to communicate and collaborate effectively with business stakeholders,
- Able to lead engineering teams in a collaborative team environment.

The REA experience

The physical, mental, emotional and financial health of our people is something we’ll never stop caring about. This is a place